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Old 27-January-2005, 07:50 PM
Arkyan Arkyan is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by russ_watters
This is all well and good, but how big is this "moon around a moon" we're talking about? Yes, a satellite can be made to orbit in a stable and reasonably circular orbit, 50 miles from the moon - but are you suggesting we call a 30m rock at that same distance another moon? Any "moon around a moon" of reasonable size would be larger, orbit much further away, and thus be perturbed quite a lot by its neighboring planet.
Oh, I'm not saying that there do exist "moons around moons" as much as I was suggesting that orbital configurations for them can exist. I agree that the liklihood of any object large enough to be considered a "moon" would be found orbiting another "moon" to be very small. Of course, this only further illustrates why it'd be nice to have a firm, scientific definition for the term "moon"
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